ECHOES OF THE PAST: THE FOLK TRADITION OF COVER SONGS; “IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA”

Part Seven: Making a Ballad of a Broken Reverie

Neutral Milk Hotel wasn’t just a band. For a certain subset of listeners—especially the ones with notebooks full of cryptic verses, lacked the ability to harmonize their voice, but see the forest for the trees —they were proof of life. The kind that doesn’t require polish to be powerful. They didn’t ask for your admiration. They whispered something stranger: permission.

“Jeff Mangum was one of the first singers I ever heard who didn’t sound good in a traditional sense,” says Ramon. “and that was okay, if not the point. His voice wasn’t polished, but his lyrics—those were undeniable. You couldn’t sing it better because it wasn’t about pitch. It was about belief… his unique voice offered a new perspective…”

Ramon didn’t come to music the usual way. He came to it sideways.

“I got into music as a writer. You could say I was like a child poet— the kind that knows it (laughs). Pretty quickly I realized the most popular form of poetry in the world wasn’t two dimensional, ink and paper—it was the lyric. I had to learn music. Once I started, I never stopped. Sometimes I got lost, some things I forgot, but I never stopped…”

Discovering Neutral Milk Hotel, for Ramon, was “a kind of awakening— to how much was still undiscovered” Mangum’s surrealist word-benders and ragged delivery didn’t just carve out a space for misfits—they made that space holy.

“He made room for people like me. The word smiths that weren’t vocalists The kids that can break down the differences of a dozen types of screaming, because that’s what they grew up on… ”

So when In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was added to Blankets It was reinterpreted into a slow-motion thank-you letter to the ghost of a band thats equal parts poetic confluence and disintegrated dissonance.

Ayla had never heard the original. Somehow, despite being surrounded by people for whom the album was sacred text, she’d made it to the other side of her twenties without crossing paths with Mangum. That turned out to be a gift.

“She didn’t have any baggage with it,” Ramon says. “No nostalgia, no expectations. She just listened and responded. There was no mimicry to unlearn—just instinct.”

“It’s like she’s whispering sweet nothings to you while luring you into a procession that so happens to be your own funeral,” Ramon says. “It’s tragic. It’s beautiful. It’s Neutral… it’s Milk… it’s a cheap and dirty Hotel— everything and nothing. And suddenly, this song you’ve heard a thousand times shows up with a new voice—not just soft and sweet, but sharp, and believable.”

Technically speaking, very little needed fixing.There was however, something big missing.

“Just a few light rides,” Ramon says. “+1 or 2dB on a word in the middle or end of a phrase. Little tweaks for balance and clarity.. but, artistically speaking— there really wasn’t anything to fix. I wanted to believe it, but didn’t want to miss something if I let myself relax and rest on my laurels too soon. I lacked any association to the track being being problematic, so I started to hear my own relief, and not what was, or wasn’t, there. Most of the songs had something that stuck out and made you think, in an otherwise safe and thoughtless space. The lack of irritation moving into the final stages of post production could’ve cost me whatever little bit of self respect I had left. Just Imagine me finally noticing there was no bass while listening back to the master copy. And then explaining it to everyone forever after…”

Then, in the last hours when nothing should be left except over thoughts and the relief of being wrong, the intro refused to cooperate. The vocal takes were tracked hot, and we tracked a lot—so hot the room itself started showing up.

“You could hear the space. Not just the voice, but the air around it. I tried cleaning it up, but the silence felt dead. The noise was the thing holding it together.”

So he leaned into it.

Like with the vinyl scratches in Creep, Ramon brought in a propeller plane—soft, ambient, and low enough to feel rather than hear. It lifts off gently, lifting lifting the listener through with the first few lines of lyrics, and sputtering out just when the drums clamor into the audio field.

“The intro propeller / airplane field recording is a good example of my approach to problem solving, as a producer, and an artist. Any gifted liar can fabricate a distraction from from the cause story teller can reverse engineer meaningful coincidences from any number potentials. However whimsical, if you sold yourself on pure intention, the full meaning will reveal itself to be meaningful. Just don’t force it. Forced sight is not foresight.

There was an ongoing internal dialog of adding the obvious acoustic guitar, and a but the song seemed to decline. “I figured if I didn’t feel compelled to add it by the time I had gone subtractive, that was my answer.”

Withholding guitar left the instrumentation relatively unaltered from the original demo, unless you consider EQ, compression, reverb etc.— the only song on the album by a margin of 100% where thats the case, but once in a while, the universe smiles down on you, and requires nothing to change.

From arrangement to performance, to mix, the whole thing seems to exist in a kind of stillness—
and offers with it the willingness to pass through that stillness with whatever hope or fear or love you can carry-on, knowing you will have to let it all go.
And you do.
And somehow you make it through—
and are better for it (for once).

NY

Neutral Milk Hotel: Myth, Magnetism, and the Safety Underground

Before the reverence, before the cult status, Neutral Milk Hotel was just a project passed between friends. Jeff Mangum started it in the early ‘90s as part of the Elephant 6 collective—an informal network of lo-fi visionaries that included The Olivia Tremor Control and The Apples in Stereo. They traded cassette tapes, swapped instruments, and treated music-making like a fever dream.

In 1996, On Avery Island introduced Mangum’s jagged, emotionally raw songwriting to the world. Two years later, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea landed—an album built on surrealist imagery, war trauma, spectral love, and a fixation with Anne Frank that no one could quite explain but everyone felt. It didn’t sound like anything else. It still doesn’t.

The record was rough-edged and devotional, like a letter written in the dark by someone who’d already left the room. It became one of Merge Records’ best sellers, but more than that, it became a rite of passage. The kind of album you didn’t just listen to—you got handed. You discovered. You played for someone you trusted at 2 a.m., and they either got it or they didn’t. And if they did, they were in.

Then Mangum vanished.

He turned down opening for R.E.M., ignored press, and slid into semi-reclusion for more than a decade. Occasionally he’d reappear—once to sing harmonies with The Olivia Tremor Control, another time to perform at Occupy Wall Street with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a crowd willing to sing the horn lines. In 2013, the band reunited for a final run of shows. After that, the lights went back out.

“They weren’t prolific,” Ramon says. “But they didn’t need to be. They changed what was allowed. That’s lasting.”

Honorable Mentions | Playlist Highlights

As with every Echoes installment, a playlist accompanies the piece—tracing the lineage of a song through its reinterpretations. Aeroplane, unsurprisingly, has fewer covers than you might expect. Reverence has a way of scaring people off.

• Matt Pond PA – Orchestral and snow-globed, a softened take that exchanges rawness for gentle ache.

• Dan Mangan – Slower, stripped down, and quietly affecting. Where the original had a theremin, Mangan opts for a whistle—pulling the song gently into the folk realm, where it still manages to sting in all the right places.

• Fast Food Paradise – A shoegazey, slow-surf jam that sounds like a vintage future. It plays like the world we could’ve had if this kind of music existed in the ‘50s—maybe world peace and climate action wouldn’t be things we’re still chasing.

• Amz Jamz – A refreshingly electronic female vocal take, floating across muted pads and hesitating rhythms. It feels like someone stumbling through grief and understanding, not because she wrote it—but because she recognizes it.

• CouchCouch – Think barbershop quartet by way of a waltzing daydream. Layered harmonies drift over nice, reverb-ridden guitars—tones that appear just as you start to wonder if there’s something you or they, forgot. Reassurance is found in the relentless drone of the vocals, which ride the wave of a slow look beyond… what? I’m not sure…

References

Songfacts. (n.d.). In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. Retrieved July 10, 2025, from https://www.songfacts.com/facts/neutral-milk-hotel/in-the-aeroplane-over-the-sea

Images

Last.fm. (n.d.). Neutral Milk Hotel images. Retrieved July 10, 2025, from https://www.last.fm/music/Neutral+Milk+Hotel/+images/f818ef041770a3f1dc384a2111b2fc72